Wednesday, June 3, 2015

As I mentioned in aprevious post, there is an over-demand for measurements, rankings and assessments. This is so as, on the demand side of information, advocacy groups and practitioners find it easier to promote something based on certain results that they cab prove. On the supply side of information, champions inside public administration need to “sell” the benefits that these types of polices bring (and to show them that the pros surpass the cons) to the staff implementing these policies as well as the heads of the agencies and/or governments taking the decisions.

The large amount of people in this session might be related to the above-mentioned demand for measurements. As a rapporteur, there is not much I can say about this session, as the work was mainly focus on each of the individual groups. Each of them focused on a key issue regarding measurements. They were:

-Refining the Common Assessment Methods Framework

-Building a Roadmap for open data measurements

-Creating resources for researchers

-Assessing sectoral open data: the case of National Statistical systems

Global rankings, ratings, indexes, barometers, they all refer to the idea of placing the elements of a given universe in a certain order. However, this order is not arbitrary. Thus, rankings, ratings, among others, refer to the placement of a certain list of objects according to a set of criteria/variables. In this sense, it does not necessarily mean that the objects in the first positions of that ranking are more valuable/useful than the ones at the bottom. It just means that those first objects are closer to preferable conditions set by the author of that scale. The first 3 groups have a clear relationship with the development and refinement of previous and future variables/criteria to assess the different initiatives.

At the end of the session facilitators met and selected the messages (actions) that were later taken to the plenary. Barbara Ubaldi presented to the plenary. For new developments on this action area, the IODC organizers suggested to check theaction area #7 in their website. Hopefully we will see less overlapping and more accuracy in the measuring exercises to come.